James Franco, Dave Franco, Alison Brie. Directed by James Franco. 103 minutes. Rated PG-13. Franco’s film about the making of notorious cult movie The Room is more of a loving tribute than an exposé. People unfamiliar with The Room may be underwhelmed by this mildly affecting story of friendship among misfits, but Franco packs the cast with enough comedy ringers to make the movie consistently amusing. —JB

Theaters:DTS, FH, GVR, RR, SC, SF, SP, TS

Just Getting Started(Not reviewed)

Tommy Lee Jones, Morgan Freeman, Rene Russo. Directed by Ron Shelton. 90 minutes. Rated PG-13. A former FBI agent and a former mob lawyer team up to stop a hitman at a Palm Springs golf resort.

Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen. Directed by Joachim Trier. 116 minutes. Not rated. In Norwegian with English subtitles. This mesmerizing story about a teenage girl whose repressed sexuality manifests itself in dangerous telekinetic and telepathic powers is a bit like Carrie reimagined as a Scandinavian art film, but the constant threat of otherworldly peril gives even the slower moments a sense of the unpredictable and unsettling. —JB

Theaters:VS

Unexpectedly Yours(Not reviewed)

Sharon Cuneta, Robin Padilla, Julia Barretto. Directed by Cathy Garcia-Molina. 120 minutes. Not rated. In Filipino with English subtitles. Two former high school classmates find themselves drawn to each other while planning a class reunion decades later.

Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright. Directed by Doug Liman. 117 minutes. Rated R. Cruise gives one of his most purely enjoyable performances in a while as pilot Barry Seal, who smuggled drugs, guns and intelligence for both cartels and the U.S. government in the 1980s. It’s a glib but relatively entertaining take on some serious real-life material. —JB

Voices of Saara Chaudry, Laara Sadiq, Shaista Latif. Directed by Nora Twomey. 94 minutes. Rated PG-13. An 11-year-old girl in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan disguises herself as a boy to provide for her family after her father is imprisoned. The depiction of despair can get a little heavy-handed, but the filmmakers know when to lighten the mood, and the hand-drawn animation is always lovely and expressive. —JB

Voices of Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt. Directed by Lee Unkrich. 109 minutes. Rated PG. Young Miguel gets trapped in the land of the dead during the Mexican Dia de los Muertos holiday in Pixar’s bright, family-friendly animated movie. Miguel’s quest is a mostly simple story about family bonds, but the journey is still well worth taking, thanks to the gorgeously realized world. —JB

Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, Linda Cardellini. Directed by Sean Anders. 100 minutes. Rated PG-13. The shared parenthood of former rivals Brad (Ferrell) and Dusty (Wahlberg) is challenged when their own dads (played by John Lithgow and Mel Gibson) come to visit.

Voices of Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda. 90 minutes. Rated PG. There’s a sense of tired obligation to the third movie in the animated series about reformed supervillain Gru (Carell), which runs barely 90 minutes and throws together a handful of haphazard storylines. Nothing in the plot carries much of an impact, despite the series of apparently momentous developments. —JB

Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 106 minutes. Rated PG-13. Nolan’s docudrama about the evacuation of Dunkirk early in World War II is perhaps the boldest gamble yet made by this ambitious director, injecting a potentially alienating degree of abstraction into the sheer intensity of pitched battle. Once again, he somehow makes it work. —MD

Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe. Directed by Sean Baker. 115 minutes. Rated R. Baker (Tangerine) chronicles the lives of marginally employed parents and unsupervised kids living in the garishly colored budget motels near Disney World outside Orlando. It’s a celebration of the camaraderie and optimism of people whose lives could be seen from the outside as desperate or sad. —JB

Pierce Brosnan, Jackie Chan, Charlie Murphy. Directed by Martin Campbell. 114 minutes. Rated R. Chan gets a refreshingly serious role as a London father who loses his daughter in a suspected IRA bombing and tries to find the killers, but the movie simply leaves him behind to focus on Brosnan in a showier role as a cabinet minister, as well as frequent, pathetic explanations of the plot. —JMA

Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Ruby Modine. Directed by Christopher Landon. 96 minutes. Rated PG-13. A spoiled sorority girl (Rothe) relives the day of her murder over and over again in this surprisingly entertaining (if completely silly) horror movie. The filmmakers have fun with the goofy premise, and Rothe gives a winning performance as the seemingly vapid hero who embraces her supernatural fate. —JB

Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard. Directed by Andy Muschietti. 135 minutes. Rated R. This new adaptation of Stephen King’s classic horror novel takes on just half the story of seven friends who combat an ancient evil, focusing on the characters as children in the late 1980s. It’s a slick modern horror movie that loses a bit of personality but boasts effective scares and consistently strong performances. —JB

Theaters:TC, TX

Jigsaw

Matt Passmore, Callum Keith Rennie, Hannah Emily Anderson. Directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig. 92 minutes. Rated R. The Saw horror series returns after a long hiatus with no new ideas, merely rehashing the same elaborate death traps and moralistic lessons, and further convoluting the back story of serial killer Jigsaw. The performances are especially bad, and even the gore is uninspired. —JB

Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller. Directed by Zack Snyder. 121 minutes. Rated PG-13. This team-up of DC’s biggest superheroes is a simple, streamlined superhero story, with one hero (Affleck’s Batman) gathering others (including Wonder Woman and Aquaman) to take on a world-ending threat. The action is rote, the special effects are surprisingly poor, and the character interactions are only occasionally entertaining. —JB

Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Julianne Moore. Directed by Matthew Vaughn. 141 minutes. Rated R. Egerton returns as an agent of ultra-secret spy agency Kingsman in the sequel to 2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, with Moore as his latest adversary. For fans of the first movie’s cacophonous, CGI-filled assault on the senses, Circle offers a louder, brighter version that’s just as empty and even more exhausting. —JB

Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Beanie Feldstein. Directed by Greta Gerwig. 93 minutes. Rated R. Gerwig’s solo writing and directing debut follows many of the familiar beats of the teenage coming-of-age story, but Gerwig gives it a personal specificity that sets it apart, depicting the sullen, sensitive title character (Ronan) with a low-key authenticity and a sharp (but not unrealistic) wit. —JB

Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne. Directed by Richard Linklater. 124 minutes. Rated R. Cranston, Fishburne and Carell play Vietnam vets who reunite, decades later, to bury one of their sons, killed in Iraq. The film is adapted from a novel that was a sequel to The Last Detail; director Linklater has severed the connection, changing names and details, but that robs the story of much of its poignancy. —MD

Voices of Douglas Booth, Eleanor Tomlinson, Saoirse Ronan. Directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman. 94 minutes. Rated PG-13. Animated from hundreds of actual oil paintings, this biopic about artist Vincent Van Gogh is a visual achievement that stifles its own dull, contrived storytelling. A series of talking heads describe Van Gogh’s last days in a stilted investigation awkwardly incorporating the painter’s most famous images. —JB

Theaters:COL, VS

The Man Who Invented Christmas

Dan Stevens, Christoper Plummer, Jonathan Pryce. Directed by Bharat Nalluri. 104 minutes. Rated PG. This cloying pseudo-biopic purports to tell the story of how Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, contorting itself to make one-to-one connections between the author’s life and the fictional story. Stevens is overly manic as Dickens, the supposed real-life details ring false, and the uplifting message is completely unearned. —JB

Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Dan Stevens. Directed by Reginald Hudlin. 118 minutes. Rated PG-13. This biopic about civil rights activist Thurgood Marshall (Boseman) is really about one case early in his law career, when he teamed with a white Jewish lawyer (Gad) to defend a black chauffeur accused of rape. The courtroom drama is pretty entertaining, even if it’s completely predictable and often played very broadly. —JB

Ross Lynch, Anne Heche, Dallas Roberts. Directed by Marc Meyers. 107 minutes. Rated R. A dramatization of the life of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer during his teenage years, as seen through the eyes of his friends and family.

Theaters:GVR, VS

My Little Pony: The Movie

Voices of Tara Strong, Ashleigh Ball, Andrea Libman. Directed by Jayson Thiessen. 99 minutes. Rated PG. This feature-length expansion of the long-running animated TV series doesn’t really qualify as more than a long episode, with its piecemeal story about the magical ponies of Equestria on a mission to save their home. The animation and storytelling remain simple and straightforward, which will please dedicated fans but offers little beyond that. —JB

Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo. Directed by Dan Gilroy. 129 minutes. Rated PG-13. Washington does some of the most strenuous acting of his lengthy career as the title character in this portrait of a socially awkward lawyer whose strict code of ethics gets challenged by a morally ambiguous slickster (Farrell). The film itself is nearly as labored as Washington’s performance. —MD

Voices of Steven Yeun, Aidy Bryant, Keegan-Michael Key. Directed by Timothy Reckart. 86 minutes. Rated PG. A group of animals led by an intrepid donkey play an important part in the birth of Jesus Christ.

Theaters:AL, BS, CAN, CH, COL, DI, FH, PAL, RR, SF, SP, SS, TS, TX

The Swindlers

Yoo Ji-Tae, Hyun Bin, Bae Seong-Woo. Directed by Jang Chang-Won. 117 minutes. Not rated. In Korean with English subtitles. A group of con artists working for the police (or are they?) attempt to catch a notorious embezzler who faked his own death (or did he?) in this silly, convoluted—but occasionally entertaining—Korean thriller. The plot is dopey and the characters are thin, but there are a few stylish set pieces. —JB

Miles Teller, Haley Bennett, Beulah Koale. Directed by Jason Hall. 108 minutes. Rated R. Like the platitude expressed by its title, Thank You for Your Service has the best of intentions but rings a bit hollow in its efforts to honor the sacrifices made by America’s troops. Mostly following one soldier (Teller) as he adjusts to life back home, it’s full of clunky lesson-learning moments. —JB

Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson. Directed by Martin McDonagh. 115 minutes. Rated R. McDonagh’s third film, starring McDormand as the outraged mother of a murdered teen, is quite taken with its own cleverness, to the detriment of storytelling and characterization. The strong performances smooth over some of the rough spots, but not enough to make up for the shifts in motivation and tone. —JB

Jacob Tremblay, Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson. Directed by Stephen Chbosky. 113 minutes. Rated PG. Adapted from R.J. Palacio’s 2012 children’s book about a 10-year- old boy (Room’s Tremblay) born with facial disfigurements, Wonder observes the fallout when his parents (Roberts and Wilson) finally decide it’s time for him to attend school with his peers. It’s partly a complex drama, partly an earnest anti-bullying PSA. —MD